Synopsis NURSE.FIGHTER.BOY is an urban love story about the soul of a mother, the heart of a fighter, and the faith of a child. JUDE is a single mother who descends from a long line of Jamaican caregivers. SILENCE is a ‘past his prime’ boxer who fights illegally to survive. CIEL is a boy who delves into music, conjuring dreams for his mother. During the last week of summer, a late-night [Read more...]
Red Balloon & White Mane Albert Lamorisse’s films talk directly to our hearts with beautiful pictures and little words. Behind the simplest stories, these post-WWII films (featuring the director’s own son Pascal and stunning Alain Emery) contain the director’s complex feelings about the war, good vs evil, and the future that the post-war children had to rebuild. In 2011, the hardest [Read more...]
"Hibakusha & My Journey" Dir. Takashi Kunimoto, 64 min, color, 2008 Synopsis "In his documentary film 'Traveling with Hibakusha: Across Generations,' Takashi Kunimoto focuses on the 'younger A-bomb survivors' who experienced the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when they were babies or small children and so don't hold clear memories of their ordeal. The film is a record of a [Read more...]
Duckling What is “Family”? What is “me”? As Japan’s communal family system collapses and families become more nuclear, the relationship between “me” and “family” shifts. We hear about so many incidents around the world every day, but the relationship between “me” and “my family” seems the most common problem. The massacre in Akihabara, the fatal stabbing of a father in Kawaguchi City by his [Read more...]
2009 Vancouver International Film Festival - Dragons and Tigers Award 2009 Hong Kong International Film Festival - Golden Digital Prize the 65th Venice Film Festival Directed by Emily Tang produced by Chow Keung, Jia Zhangke, Li Xiudong Synopsis: Two women cross paths at a turning point in their lives. Strangers and very different, yet somehow their pasts and futures may [Read more...]
Shot, Written, and Directed by Luciana Burlamaqui 150min. (Pt 1 & 2), Color, documentary, Brazil, 2009, In portguese w/ English & Japanese subtitles Festivals (Selected): 2010 International Cinema Festival in Guadalajara (Mexico)- The Best Latin American Feature Documentary 2009 The 4th Cinema and Human Rights in Latin America Show (16 cities in Brazil)- Audience Award for Best Feature [Read more...]
This legendary film became even more meaningful this year - after the mega-radiation leakage followed by the 3.11.disaster and the death of Yoshiko Tanaka, the actress who played the protagonist in this film. With the tribute to her life and the people described in the film, and also with the sense of warning to what's going on in the current Japan in mind, we will show it again. Hirosuke [Read more...]
”The Cats of Mirikitani”『ミリキタニの猫』by Linda Hattendorf 74 min U.S.A. Eighty-year-old Jimmy Mirikitani survived the trauma of WWII internment camps, Hiroshima, and homelessness by creating art. But when 9/11 threatens his life on the New York City streets and a local filmmaker brings him to her home, the two embark on a journey to confront Jimmy's painful past. An intimate exploration of the [Read more...]
Onkalo (Finnish for "hiding place") is under construction: it's a cavernous world of tunnels and corridors, a permanent storage facility for nuclear waste, meant to last 100,000 years (that's 20 times as long as the pyramids have so far). Conceptual artist Michael Madsen's film is a creepy, eerily elegant meditation on human folly, punctuated by philosophical and historical references, [Read more...]